A s many people have noticed, masochism had a peculiar prominence in Victorian culture, especially after mid-century: Christopher Herbert, for example, speaks of "an essentially masochistic cultural and political unconscious" in Victorian England.1 The "unconscious" and therefore unstable nature of Victorian masochism is worth stressing, since Victorian culture both pathologized and normalized masochistic display. On the one hand, masochism fueled the excesses of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, fin-de-siecle decadence, and New Woman writing. The drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, to cite the most vivid instance, scandalously eroticize pain-as do a wide range of late-century novels, from H. Rider Haggard's She (1887) through Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893). On the other hand, masochism was central to the mainstream bourgeois novel, where, earlier in the century, celebrated works like WutheringHeights (1847) and GreatExpectations (1861) had defined the masochistic male as the moral center
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